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May 16, 2004
Excerpts: ...God save the king
Thalassa Ali describes the funeral of Maharajah Kharrak Singh, the son of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, and the conspiracy that subsequently unfolds
LAHORE, November 5, 1840
“Careful, be careful,” whispered the prime minister as court servants lifted the dying Maharajah Kharrak Singh from his bed in the Lahore Citadel. Half a dozen white-bearded priests stood by chanting prayers as the servants lowered their king to the floor of the crowded room, so that he might die in the lap of Mother Earth.
The Maharajah shivered, whimpering beneath the shawls they had laid over him. His long hair unfurled dankly on the tiled floor, lit by the flame of a small, earthenware lamp. A priest knelt beside him, reciting. Other priests joined him. Incense clouded the air, causing the watching nobles to blink and rub their eyes.
“Ram, Ram, Ram,” chanted the priests.
“Say it, Maharaj,” urged the kneeling priest.
The Maharajah attempted to speak but abandoned the effort. His eyes rolled upward. Someone came forward, felt for his pulse, then shook his head.
A high-pitched sound came from one of the nobles. The chanting grew louder. A man wearing several emerald necklaces stepped forward. He set a gold lamp, already lit, beside the shrunken, grey-faced body. An aristocratically dressed youth followed, unbuckling his sword belt as he did so. Dry-eyed, Prince Nau Nihal Singh untied the precious Kashmir shawl he wore round his waist and, with a single swift movement, spread it over his dead father...
After his father’s stiffening body had been dressed in saffron scented clothes and jewels, Prince Nau Nihal Singh strode from the antechamber and past the attending nobles. Alone, the prince climbed a winding staircase to the sunlit courtyard beyond, while behind him the eunuchs began to wail.
The scent of jasmine and frangipani hung in the air of the queens’ garden. The prince made his way to a fountain in the garden’s centre and sat down on its marble edge. There he stayed, so lost in thought that he scarcely looked up when approaching footsteps heralded the arrival of the foreign minister.
“May I offer my condolences, prince?” asked the Faqeer. The young man nodded an invitation to the neatly dressed man, who sat down beside him and pulled his coarse-looking robe together over his knees. “I am sorry to be bringing this up so soon,” the foreign minister said, “but there is much to be done. I fear that if you do not act quickly, you may find it difficult to control the other contenders for the throne, especially your uncle Sher Singh.”
The prince’s nineteen-year-old face hardened. “Most of my family members are as weak as my father was. As for my uncle Sher Singh, he is popular with the army, but no more than I am. I have no fear of him, Faqeer Sahib.”
“And the prime minister, with his riches and his private army?”
“I will keep Dhian Singh close to me. His guns and men will be at my command.”
“Ah.” The Faqeer nodded. He got to his feet, embroidered silk peeping from beneath the coarse beggar’s robe he had affected for years. “Your grandfather,” he said smoothly, “was a great man. He was a brilliant soldier and horseman, and an inspired leader. He loved a good joke, and he passionately loved the Punjab. I pray that you will be able to wield his sword.”
The young man met the Faqeer’s eyes with his own level gaze. “They will be taking my father’s body outside now,” he said coldly, then rose to his feet.
The Maharajah’s elephants and horses had been given away in charity, as had hundreds of thousands of rupees and gold mohurs. The dead Maharajah’s body had been placed on a gold and silver bier and covered with many shawls. The moment had come for the funeral cortege to pass through the city and on to the garden outside its walls, where the square sandal- and aloes-wood pyre stood waiting.
The foreign minister and his assistant walked at the end of the procession. Having witnessed the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s funeral only two years earlier, Hassan Ali Khan and Faqeer Azizuddin had no need to see the forced passage of his mad son’s golden, shawl-draped bier through the crowded streets, or to hear the praying of male onlookers. They did not need to hear the wailing of the women thronging the latticework balconies above them, or see the people surge towards the four doomed queens who walked barefoot behind their husband’s bier, throwing their jewellery into the crowd.
“Sati Ma, Mother Sati, pray for me, pray for my sins!” cried the crowd as it pushed forward, heedless of the guards, to clutch at the clothes of the stony-faced queens.
“Have those poor women been drugged?” Hassan asked the Faqeer as the two men followed at a distance.
“I do not know,” the Faqeer answered, “but I was told that the four who are to be burned laughed and danced at the Citadel before the procession left. All the rest fainted when the bier was carried out. That should tell us something about those women’s condition.” He grimaced and tipped his chin towards the front of the procession. “But I had not realized that seven serving women were to burn as well.”
After an hour of prayers and ceremony, the crowd sighed gustily as the four queens climbed onto the pyre in order of seniority, followed unsteadily by the seven chosen serving maids, each one helped by two other women. Slowly, as if half asleep, the women lay down, the Maharajah’s wives at his head, the servants at his feet.
“The senior queen is not among the satis,” murmured Hassan. Men climbed onto the pyre and covered the corpse and all the living women with oil-soaked reed mats. Others poured vessels of clarified butter over the logs. The chanting grew louder. The prime minister took a flaming torch from a priest and handed it to Prince Nau Nihal, who nodded and began to circle the pyre, his lips moving.
As the fire took hold at all four corners, the Faqeer touched Hassan’s elbow. “Come,” he ordered. “We can respect this rite of theirs, but we need not watch it.”
The crowd sighed again. Flames shot into the air as the two men, the only Muslim officials at this Sikh funeral, edged their way towards the city gate.
The pyre was still burning two hours later, when Hassan and the Faqeer rode back to join the procession returning the Maharajah’s son to the Citadel.
Hassan gestured through the crowd towards the prime minister who rode beside the ample, heavily bearded figure of the prince’s uncle Sher Singh. “Should we ride with them?”
“It does not matter. I believe our posts at court are safe. We should let others push their way to the front.” He sighed. “I only pray that Nau Nihal Singh will display some of the qualities so lacking in his poor father.”
The afternoon sun threw shadows across the flat ground. An old stone archway stood along the high wall of the great Badshahi Mosque, marking the path to the Citadel gate. Watched by high-circling vultures and ragged villagers, the procession of nobles and courtiers rode towards the archway, while in the distance a black water buffalo lowered its head to charge a passer-by. Preoccupied with the buffalo and its fleeing victim, Hassan and the Faqeer did not turn to look until a heavy rumbling sound came from the direction of the archway, followed by thudding and shouts. The arch, together with the young prince and his party, had all disappeared inside a billowing cloud of dust.
Men threw themselves from their mounts and ran towards the scene. A horse squealed somewhere, in terror or pain. The dust-covered figure of a man staggered out of the dust cloud, clutching his shoulder.
“The arch has fallen!” someone cried.
“The prince!” shouted someone else. “Where is he?”
“Help us! Help!”
Hassan and the Faqeer kicked their horses and galloped towards the scene.
Behind them, a pair of pigeons circled the pyre twice, and then, as if at a signal, dropped into the flames.
The man outside the curtain raised his voice to be heard over the boom of cannon fire. “They are saluting the accession of Prince Sher Singh to the throne,” he shouted.
“Sher Singh?” Rani Chand Kaur, wife of one dead king and mother of another, started forward from her place on the floor of the royal ladies’ chamber. “Which one of you fools has snatched the throne from my family and handed it to the son of a clothes dyer?”
“It was not one man, Maharani-Ji. The decision was made by the full court. Who else but your brother-in-law can be Maharajah now that your son is no more?”
“Who else?” Chand Kaur had already screamed herself hoarse. Her face with its bloody, vertical scratches was as wild as her hair. “Did any of you ask whether my daughter-in-law was with child?” She pointed to a frightened-looking girl who crouched silently in a corner of the incense-filled chamber. “When my grandson is born,” the queen rasped, “he, not an upstart son of shame, will sit on the throne of the Punjab. Pah! You are fools, sons of owls, all of you.”
The cannon fire had ceased. “We did not know this, Maharani-Ji,” said the male voice.
But Rani Chand Kaur had lost interest in the conversation. Seizing the neck of her long shirt with both hands she tore it wide open.
“They have killed my son!” she shrieked. “My son! When I find the man who took my injured son to the Hazuri Bagh instead of to this palace,” she went on raggedly, the tattoo on her chin changing shape with every word she spoke, “when I find out who locked all the garden and the Citadel gates so that I could not go to him when he was dying, I will put his eyes out with my own hands.”
Excerpted with permission from
A Beggar at the Gate
By Thalassa Ali
Review/Headline Book Publishing, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH Website: www.reviewbooks.co.uk Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi. Tel: 021-5683026 Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website: www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 0-7472-6980-7
333pp. £10.99 Rs530
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